Today, I encountered the rare IRS employee who retained his humanity, which meant he could acknowledge and lament the inhumanity of his fellow employees in unjustly confiscating a company’s funds in violation of the IRS’ own regulations. “It can happen,” he said matter-of-factly.
To the rest of them, I recite some A.D. Hope:
The Kings
The lion in deserts royally takes his prey;
Gaunt crags cast back the hunting eagle’s scream.
The King of Parasites, delicate, white and blind,
Ruling his world of fable even as they,
Dreams out his greedy and imperious dream
Immortal in the bellies of mankind.
In a rich bath of pre-digested soup,
Warm in the pulsing bowel, safely shut
From the bright ambient horror of sun and air,
is slender segments ripening loop by loop,
Broods the voluptuous monarch of the gut,
The Tapeworm, the prodigious Solitaire.
Alone among the royal beasts of prey
He takes no partner, no imperial mate
Seeks his embrace and bears his clamorous brood;
Within himself, in soft and passionate play,
Two sexes in their vigour celebrate
The raptures of helminthine solitude.
From the barbed crown that hooks him to his host,
The limble ribbon, fecund, flat and wet
Sways as the stream’s delicious juices move;
And as the ripe joints rupture and are lost,
Quivers in the prolonged, delirious jet
And spasm of unremitting acts of love.
And Nature no less prodigal in birth
In savage profusion spreads his royal sway:
Herds are his nurseries till the mouths of men
At public feasts, or the domestic hearth,
Or by the hands of children at their play,
Transmit his line to human flesh again.
The former times, as emblems of an age,
Graved the gier-eagle’s pride, the lion’s great heart,
Leviathan sporting in the perilous sea;
Pictured on History’s of the Muse’s page,
All knew the King, the Hero, set apart
To stand up stiff against calamity,
Breed courage amid a broken nation’s groans,
Cherish the will in men about to die,
To chasten with just rule a barbarous tribe
And guard, at last the earth that kept his bones.
And still the Muse, who does not flatter or lie,
Finds for our age a symbol to describe.
The secret life of Technocratic Man,
Abject desire, base fear that shapes his law,
His idols of the cave, the mart, the sty –
No lion at bay for a beleaguered clan,
No eagle with the serpent in his claw,
Nor dragon soter with his searing eye,
But the great, greedy, parasitic worm,
Sucking the life of nations from within
Blind and degenerate, snug in excrement.
`Behold your dream!’ she says. `View here the form
And mirror of Time, the Shape you trusted in
While your world crumbled and my heavens were rent.’